A Blog of Personal Thoughts

On the Fairweather Grounds

May 2025

He felt alone, very alone. And scared. Darren knew that the tides at Lituya Bay now forbid entry. He was going to have to stick and stay, make it pay. Keep on fishing.

He and his 17-year-old son, Aaron, had left July 1 for the Fairweather Grounds. Aaron is his youngest boy and doesn’t remember when he started going out commercial fishing other than that he was still in a straw laundry basket they used on the boat for the children when they were babies. When he was four, the family went from Sitka to Port Alexander, a 3-hour trip that turned into 12. Darren had bought and refurbished a military tugboat, the strong-as-an-ox Glenmar. It was Christmas Eve and the boat was loaded with presents friends in Sitka had asked them to take to P.A. to their own family members. Down in the cabin was Darren’s wife, Brenda, and new baby, Mariah, swaying back and forth in her laundry basket crib. Aaron was four then and in the pilothouse with his dad. He wasn’t scared; he loved it. He woo-hooped these waves and swells that occasionally had Darren standing on the wall of the wheelhouse. Aaron was six or eight years old when he first worked as a deckhand with his father on a commercial trip and then sometimes for his uncles too. He’s 5’ 10” and as lanky as the rest of the men in his family. His father and brothers are blond, but Aaron has dark curly hair and an easy smile for those he knows.

Running out, they passed the rough seas that always lay at the entrance to Taylor Bay. From Darren’s perspective, it was always the worst water of the trip. The engine hummed as they rounded Cape Spencer. With the boat at full throttle of eight knots, they passed Astrolabe Point and Palma Bay, then the snout of La Pérouse Glacier, places that marked their passage on their eight-hour run to the grounds. As always, Aaron and Darren traded running the boat. They chatted occasionally, kept an eye on the weather, which was as good as the prediction.  

Darren reflected on the Fairweather Grounds. It is a big mountain range, an underwater island, which is an extension of the misnamed Fairweather Mountain Range. Whoever named these mountains the Fairweather Range caught them on a good day, maybe even one of its rare, good weeks. Those who live on land grumble for three weeks as it rains continuously, but when the sun comes out for a day, they wrap themselves in the beauty of the land, mountain ranges and ocean, declaring this area is the perfect place to live. They forget they live in the largest temperate rain forest of the planet. As if a planet can boast the facts of geography, the Fairweather Range is the tallest coastal range on the planet. The Fairweathers, as they are affectionately called like the next-door neighbor might be, seem to spawn the smaller surrounding ranges. All of them get their share of storms throughout the year. Sometimes the Fairweathers seem to hold back the autumn or winter storms for a few days till they build enough force to come powering into the ten- and fifteen-thousand-foot peaks dumping feet of snow that help maintain the glacial thickness massing their slopes. Before they hit the Range, though, the storms have built up across hundreds of miles of ocean to create their own oceanic turmoil, swells, crests, and screaming winds. Beneath the ocean’s surface lies a hidden but similar topography. The deep water moves fast with big tides until it hits these underground mountains. The water then rises quickly and makes turbulent seas and good riptides. Except no riptide is good.  

Fifty miles to the east of this beauty and drama, Darren lives on a quiet dirt road three miles as the raven flies from Icy Strait, 40 miles from Cross Sound, Southeast Alaska’s northernmost entrance to the Gulf of Alaska. He built a traditional colonial New England house with the front door in the middle and two sets of windows on either side both upstairs and down. Somehow he managed to groom his patch of spruce forest in the midst of the Tongass National Forest into a tidy New England lawn. His attached two-vehicle garage replaces the 1700s attached barns so common to the northeastern climate. When he was 10 years old, his father, a plumber named Bill moved the family from Connecticut to Oregon. They both stand about 5 feet 10 inches and have a gravelly voice, a voice Darren says comes from too much time talking over the noise of a boat’s motor.

Shortly after he got to Oregon, Darren began to fish its rivers, and a year or two later, still not a teenager, he found a double-ender for river fishing. He’d get caught for skipping school to go fishing. What he learned, though, was where the fish liked to be in the currents and where they liked to hide when not in the currents, a lesson that would prove valuable once he figured out how he could get paid for catching fish. When he was 20, he came to Alaska on a fishing trip, his sole previous experience being his double-ended dory. He got hooked on the place. His first son was born when Darren was 18, then another and later Aaron. Aaron is the only one of his six children who likes the commercial fishing life.

The first day of this July fishing had been okay but nothing to write home about. They traded running the Mustang, a 48-foot steel Spangler boat well-built for fishing in the seas. They brought in fish, then let out the lines again, a routine they did without comment since they had worked together for ten years. Amidst the 40 other boats on the Grounds, they fished all that first day with decent results in calm seas.

Drifting that night, they both caught a short sleep. Before the sun rose, about 3:30 at that time of year, Darren awoke to hear the rigging whistling. Before he laid down for what would be his last long sleep of a couple of hours, he saw the other boats on his radar idling into what would become the storm. He jogged into it, threw the gear in the water and immediately started catching fish. He woke Aaron up and told him to run the boat. Darren was reluctant to run in to Lituya. He checked the tides and his location. He was 30 to 40 miles out, too far from Lituya’s entrance to make it before the tide began to ebb. On the south side of this bay is a long spit that offers a narrow entrance into the seclusion of Lituya Bay. While better to go in at high slack, it is navigable at low. In bad weather there may be big swells and even breakers. At anything other than a slack tide, it is extremely dangerous, one can say guaranteed deadly. By the time they would have gotten there, it would no longer have been slack.

The entrance to Lituya Bay was well known to the Tlingits. When leaving to seal hunt, they posted a man on a sizeable rock. His job was to read the clouds over Fairweather Mountain, which they called Tl'axaan. From the shape and movement of those clouds, the lookout could predict the weather and when it was safe to go out. It was the job of another to watch for similar patterns in the clouds in order to know when it was necessary and still safe to return. The French, though, lacked such knowledge. They arrived at the area the summer of 1786 under the command of La Pérouse. La Pérouse, a highly knowledgeable mariner, recognized problematic places and situations when he saw them. Even though he lacked the history of the entrance, he had knowledge of the sea and how landmasses affected it. He recognized that the entrance to this bay was one of those potentially dangerous places. He surveyed the sea and land, wisely cautioning the small expedition’s leader, d’Escures, to wait till slack tide before taking the three yawls into the bay. D’Escures, however, was arrogant enough to disobey his commander. There was no need to discipline him though. One yawl survived but not that of d’Escures. He had proceeded too early at the cost of 21 lives. The Tlingits found some bodies on shore, but none alive. Future European mariners would now know the lessons the Tlingits had learned centuries earlier and which La Pérouse suspicioned.

That morning with gear in the water, Darren and Aaron had a decision to make. The other boats had already left for Lituya but Darren was so busy staying on the fish, he had not looked at his radar recently. He was an unusual captain. Neither a screamer nor master of his domain, he included Aaron in the decision-making. They both knew it was past decision-making time and they knew better than to take a chance at the mouth of Lituya. They made what he considered the only decision they could. They stayed and continued to fish in 35-knot winds and 45-knot gusts. Knowing the king season is so short, if he left, he risked missing the whole thing. Rules force fishermen to go out in bad weather and stay. At this moment, where would he go anyway? The mouth of Lituya and the waters of Cross Sound were both bad. As usual, it was a quiet radio group out there. None of the other fishermen contacted him as they headed in. Further, they knew Darren and the tough situations he had handled in the past. They knew who was out there. They were all mariners, not fair weather fishermen. They kept an eye on each other. They knew Darren’s attitude and that it was tougher than most.

They were so busy catching fish, that by the time Darren looked up, they were the only boat out there. It made him a little nervous to be there alone. He reflected that it was a bad, bad day the whole day.

Aaron ran the boat till about 10:00 in the morning when it got significantly worse. He then went out on deck to run the four lines with 25 hooks each. He bled the fish immediately then let the line out again. The kings were sliding all over the deck and Aaron swayed with the motion of the seas. The waves were ripping fish off the lines. Aaron figured he kept about half of them. He laughed as he watched a king pop out of the waves like a missile and go about 10 to 15 feet in the air. He might land in the boat; he might land back in the safety of the water. Aaron thought, “This is fun!” He got over being scared really fast because at first the fish were coming in on every hook and he was having fun bringing in such a good catch. He wasn’t scared for his life and he had passed that moment of freezing early on up because he was so busy. The 5- to 6-foot waves were breaking off the tops of the 20-foot swells and over the boat and Aaron, who was standing in the pit.

Like fishing, life has no guarantees and there is no solid routine to cling to. We live and fish as if by braille and Aaron stayed 100% aware. He’d been in worse storms, although this day would remain Aaron’s worst day for commercial trolling.

The storm calmed by evening and they had loaded the boat. In calmer seas, they motored home an excellent catch. It had been a money making trip and, as it turned out, a safe one as well.

Darren is at peace with what he does. He misses his family whether fishing with Aaron or alone, but out on the ocean he is at peace. It’s him and God. A humbling experience.